


dravati

by toujours_nigel



Category: Mahabharata - Vyasa
Genre: Sibling Bonding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-11
Updated: 2019-01-11
Packaged: 2019-10-08 08:00:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17382758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel
Summary: The problem with the Panchalans was that there were thrice as many of them as their father could use and they rode around Bharatvarsha making nuisances of themselves.





	dravati

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AllegoriesInMediaRes (AllegoriesInMediasRes)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AllegoriesInMediasRes/gifts).



The problem with the Panchalans was that there were thrice as many of them as their father could use now his territories had been halved, and they were all constitutionally incapable of lazing around decoratively—unlike the Hastinapuris, who had largely elevated indolence to its own art. Instead they tossed royal and ambassadorial duties to each other like the shuttles in a complicated tapestry, and rode around Bharatvarsha making themselves useful and honing skills they had no business acquiring.

If they accrued rather a lot of information they ought not have possessed, it was hardly their fault that the courts they visited took them in confidence and forgot how many of them there were, and where, and how well they could weave together the gossipy threads they were handed. It usually went well, in the Panchalan definition of well, which meant well for Panchal.

 

At other times it looked like Shatrunjaya urging a lamed horse through the forest and over Indraprastha’s well-guarded border as dusk drifted over the skies.

From the borders to the palace was three days’ riding, but he had crossed at a sizeable outpost, and the guards on duty looked at the Panchala bull stamped on his oiled pouch of messages, and embossed on his elephant-hide cuirass, and one went to rouse their medic while the other stoked the fire and set a pot of water on to boil. Shatrunjaya sat where he’d been dropped, head drooping, half insensate, let Kairav move him and unbuckle his cuirass and greaves, and run a testing hand through his hair, looking for blood, all with no protest and hardly any sound beyond a murmur. He grunted dissent when anyone approached his pouch, but they had seen couriers do more in far worse condition.

“No real injuries,” Kairav told Ojas. “Send someone with him as escort if you can spare a man, but he should be well tomorrow.”

“To be young again,” Ojas laughed, and spread his hands before the fire. They would neither of them see forty again, and the courier was lucky to have numbered twenty years; his beard was still patchy. “I’ll send Nirav. He’s aptly named, and this boy... do you think he’s someone important? All couriers ride like madmen in need, but I haven’t met many so careless of their horses. Many princes, however, who would prefer to be riding some horse of iron and oil, that they need not care for.”

“And then there’s Prince Nakula, who treats them like his kin,” Kairav said and paused, considering the Prince’s close kin, and shrugged, smiling. “It’s no measure of judgement. Ask him tomorrow.”

 

Shatrunjaya made no mystery of it the next morning, amused by the hint of scepticism with which his answers were received. He was youngest but one of a long generation, nine brothers and a sister stretched out ahead of him, and none of them much resembled each other save the two sets of twins. “Even there,” he informed Nirav, “our sister doesn’t look very much like Dhrishtadyumna, except they both have our father’s eyes, and their mother’s hands. I don’t see it, myself, but I’ve been told. She died, you see, before I was born, or maybe it’s when I was still very young. She died when they were five, which leaves me, ah, yes, not yet one. Still I can’t think why anyone would lie about a thing like that, can you? They do have our father’s eyes. I don’t, I have his nose, so does Satyajit, it’ll make things easier when they make coins for him, same profile, do you see?”

Nirav, who his trainer had commended for forest patrol because he liked quiet and was painfully sensitive to noise, nodded and began to let his mule loiter while the prince rode rambling ahead on a horse supplied from the outpost’s small stable.

Shatrunjaya took the hint graciously, and they spent the three days in silence punctuated by birdsong on the first day, and by the chatter of villages on the second. The chief of the last village between them and the city, who knew Nirav slightly and the guards very well collectively, fed them from his own kitchen and bedded them down in his yard beside his sons. Shatrunjaya spent an entertained evening telling them stories of his travels that Nirav was half-sure were generously sprinkled with lies: surely nobody actually met rakshasas and escaped unscathed without having to fight the rakshasa? He could admit that he would have doubted a story of the prince killing rakshasas just as much; he could believe it of Prince Bhima only too easily, but Shatrunjaya was lanky with youth and prone to flailing gestures and animated expressions that made him look even younger. He was slimmer than Nirav, if a handsbreadth taller, and Nirav was not of particularly heroic proportions, had trouble managing the long spear of the heavy infantry. Perhaps he had climbed a tree and screamed down stories till the rakshasa had fallen asleep, and was now declaring that friendship.

Early on the third day they rode around a bend of screening sal trees, and saw the city glimmering in the distance, and though they spent the day riding towards it it showed itself only rarely, mixing now with the drifting clouds and in a moment with the trees behind it.

“I wonder that they can bear to live in it,” Shatrunjaya said, and shook himself hard enough to send his mare dancing till he reined her deftly in. “How does one live in a demon’s last dream?”

“I do not know, O prince,” Nirav said when Shatrunjaya glanced up at the pearlescent arch of the Eastern Gate rising before them and then expectantly at him. “How does one befriend a rakshasa?”

“A good question,” Shatrunjaya said. “Perhaps some day I shall answer you. Will you wait here for me?”

“My orders were to escort you to the palace.”

“And so you have.” He nudged his horse through the gate before Nirav could protest that his time wasn’t his own, and bent with a hand tight on the pommel to show the guard on duty his credentials.

 

Indraprastha’s throne-room had animals etched in glass along the crystalline walls, and the light rippled through them to create an illusion of movement. Birds caught in mid-flight, hares and rabbits coursing below, a cheetah crouched inbetween as though on a high branch; foxes leaping out of their dens, deer running in panicked herds, bison with spreading horns, snakes in thick coils melting into and out of the walls.

“If I had not known your husbands to be valiant,” Shatrunjaya told his sister when he’d managed to convey that his news was for the Empress and been escorted to her receiving room instead, “their throne-room would have convinced me.”

“Prativindhya likes how they move,” Krishna said, laughing, “but Satanika is scared of them. His father thought it would be charming to carry his child while he held court but it all dissolved into tears.”

“Heartless woman, to laugh at your child’s sorrow. Shall I steal him away till you know better?”

He expected her to laugh it off or hit him, but she sobered even as he moved to catch her wrists. “In a year when he can do without me, perhaps. I would bid you take Prativindhya, but he is his grandmother’s delight and she might not turn him loose. They should know at least some of their uncles and cousins.”

She was pregnant again herself, swelling with child the third time in four years, moving slow and graceful as though being gravid was as habitual as drawing breath. She wouldn’t come away with him, because her husband of the year could not spare her from the task of bearing him a son. He could hardly quarrel with her over it when his own mother, with her single son, had only gone home to her father a handful of times in his eighteen years of life.

Instead he said, “I have heard that Princess Bhanumati birthed twins. There were celebrations for it in Vidarbha when the messenger came. Prince Rukmi has a son about Prativindhya’s age.”

“You’ve been in Vidarbha! Uttamauja wrote that you were in Magadha.”

“Uttamauja’s jealous. He’s spending the year learning from any minister that can bear him longer than two days at a time, and I’ve been wandering. I was in Magadha at the beginning of the year, but I thought you might have had news of me since. I’m assiduous in my reports to Father.”

“I’m not Father,” Krishna said quietly, and freed her hands from his loosened grip.

Shatrunjaya grinned, imagining her with Drupada’s high, domed crown falling down over her eyes, and then stopped as her meaning grew clearer. Satyajit or Shikhandi would have known what to say, or even Kumara; Dhrishtadyumna would never even have spoken in a way to make her look so sadly resigned. But they were all elsewhere, and he was the one in Indraprastha, looking at their only sister. It was a privilege worth paying for.

“We would all die for you much more willingly,” he told her, because it was true and she deserved to know it. “Aren’t you wondering why I’m no longer in Vidarbha?”

“I assumed you tried to seduce one of Prince Rukmi’s brothers and it went about as badly as it ever does,” Krishna said, attempting a smile. “Was it worse than the time in Kashi?”

“Seductions did occur,” Shatrunjaya admitted, trying his best to keep from smiling. He hadn’t entirely expected to be first with the news. “But it wasn’t a Vidarbhi prince, it was Shyam.”

“I’ll kill him,” Krishna said automatically. “He should know better.”

“I think he hoped it would draw Vidarbha away from Magadh, but it doesn’t seem to have worked,” Shatrunjaya admitted tentatively, unsettled by the sudden anger blazing in his sister’s eyes. “Still, Princess Rukmini wrote to him, and you have to admit being married to Shishupal is a worse fate than anyone ought to have to bear.”

“Of course,” Krishna said, and then frowned. “If Shyam’s the one who absconded with the beauteous Rukmini, why are you here instead of in Vidarbha pretending sympathy for Prince Rukmi?”

“Prince Rukmi chased after them with as many soldiers as he could find. It seemed as good a time as any to leave, before any of them decided I’d helped the beauteous Rukmini.”

Krishna frowned just like their father, forehead creasing threefold over the outer edges of her eyebrows; the hands she had inherited from her mother tapped out a restless beat before she clapped them together and stood. “Come meet your nephews. I’ll write to Father tomorrow and tell him you’re with me and safe.”

 

He hadn’t helped; it went against Panchal policy to offer help without benefit and disobeying their Father only brought about lectures from Satyajit, weapons-training with Shikhandi, and hours with Minister Dhyanojit learning about the fiscal state of Panchal and how little she could afford another war. He had merely told Rukmini stories of Shyam and his exploits, like he’d been told as a child, and like he’d have told anyone; Narada Muni had started them on it, and it was little enough to do, even in cloistering Vidarbha that kept its women close. She had hovered at King Bhishmaka’s elbow as Krishna had once at their father's, and whispered to him of court matters and tried to speak sense to him when her brother had roared and raged, and been so brilliant and resigned that Shatrunjaya—in whom nothing responded to a woman’s beauty even as much as it did in his sister—had started on the stories merely to make her laugh at Shyam’s incredible life and daring feats, like Shikhandi had told him and Kumara when they were sulking infants.

He had certainly _not_ helped her find a priest happy to smuggle notes, and he wasn’t going to change his story regardless of how many times his siblings asked.


End file.
